I have found that sometimes the pidof command does not work. This seems to be the case when a program is actually a script being interpreted by another program e.g. python. It shows up in the ps list of processes with a pid but pidof fails to return it. In this particular case it is Elisa.

There are other ways to do it involving grep and pipes and other programs but this is just a simple single command replacment for pidof.

ps -o pid –no-heading -C elisa

This may not work on all flavours of linux as they have slightly different ps commands but it works fine on Ubuntu 8.10

Sometimes I get files stuck in my recycle bin that do not get deleted when I empty the trash. This is usually because they are owned by root and my normal user does not have sufficient privileges to delete them.

sudo rm ‘ing the .trash folders on each drive does not work and after a lot of searching I finally found the folder with the trash files lurking in it here:

If you are lucky enough to get suspend working in Ubuntu it will ask for a password on resume, unfortunately there is no easy way to disable this feature. It is however posible.

You need to start the configuration editor, this is supposedly in: Applications -> System Tools -> Configuration Editor
You may need to edit your menus to enable it as it starts hidden, it seems to be Gnome’s dirty little secret that it has a registry, similar to the windows one. I don’t have it in my menus at all so in a terminal:

that will add an extra display mode called ‘view-watched’ to that particular screen.

To use this mode you need to add it to the views section of the media library that your screen uses :

So thats it, all done

bear in mind that this will probably only work with the default player as it requires the watched field in the library to be set, also if you watch a ’watched’ video it will become unwatched again, go figure..

You will also need to make sure that your importer is set to “update existing items” not “delete and reimport”. If you delete stuff after watching it you will also need to use the DeleteMissing importer as the “update existing items does not remove non-existent items.